Posts tagged Taliban
مہرین کسانه
Some Al Qaeda text up there.
The Orientalist enterprise of Western writers has received a great deal of critical attention since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. As Western academics have learned to bring more objectivity and empathy to their study of the Islamicate, a growing number of Muslim academics, novelists and journalists – in their home countries and the diaspora – have started looking at themselves through new Orientalist constructs that serve the interests of Western powers. This native Orientalism was a minor affair during the Cold War but it has grown dramatically since the launching of the West’s so-called global war against terror. This essay examines the manner in which native Orientalists in Pakistan – writing mostly in the English language – have been supporting America’s so-called global war against terror.
Abstract of Native Orientalists in Pakistan.
Currently reading this. Remember when I said Brown Uncle Toms and Sams? This is precisely about that. Excellent so far.
U.S. officials would not say how many detainees have been released under the program, though they said such cases are relatively rare. The program has existed for several years, but officials would not confirm exactly when it was established.
(via firthofforth)
From the article:
The United States has for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees from a military prison in Afghanistan as part of negotiations with insurgent groups, a bold effort to quell violence but one that U.S. officials acknowledge poses substantial risks.
[…]
Unlike at Guantanamo, releasing prisoners from the Parwan detention center, the only American military prison in Afghanistan, does not require congressional approval and can be done clandestinely. And although official negotiations with top insurgent leaders are seen by many as an endgame for the war, which has claimed nearly 2,000 U.S. lives, the strategic release program has a less ambitious goal: to quell violence in concentrated areas where NATO is unable to ensure security, particularly as troops continue to withdraw. The releases are intended to produce tactical gains but are not considered part of a grand bargain with the Taliban.
Counterproductive like always, I’m beginning to think.
(via firthofforth)
Kabul attacks - Live updates
Rockets fired at parliament building and embassies in apparently co-ordinated assault on government and diplomatic areas
Just in: “God. About 10 grenades just now in diplomatic area of Kabul #Kabulattack” via @Amiefr_Reuters.
Horrible.
This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.
- News this morning:A NATO helicopter crash in Kabul killed 12 in the helicopter and 4 civilians on the ground. A previously unreported shooting last month has been revealed in which an Afghan shot and killed a Marine.
- Jeremy Scahill wrote an excellent piece for the Nation on why President Obama has been behind the continued detention of a Yemeni journalist.
- Syria marks the one-year anniversary of its revolution’s beginnings.
- The Guardian has obtained several thousand of the private emails of Bashar and Asma al-Assad.
- Human Rights Watch reports that Syria is laying landmines along its borders with Lebanon and Turkey.
- Clashes have erupted once more in Bahrainon the one-year anniversary of a government crackdown on the revolution.
- Bahrain plans to retry 20 medics who were originally convicted and sentenced to prison terms for assisting protesters, among a number of charges of anti-state activity.
- Israel saw its latest flare-up with Gaza as a warm-up act, or practice run, for an impending war with Iran.
- The US eyes former NSC official Brett McGurk for the position of US ambassador to Iraq.
- The Afghan who crashed his pick-up truck near Secretary Panetta’s plane has died of his injuries.
- Matthieu Aikins examines a confidential NATO report on the Taliban in Afghanistan for GQ.
- The Taliban have pulled out of preliminary peace talks with the US and called off plans to establish an office in Doha.
- The suspect in the massacre of Afghan civilians has been flown to Kuwait.
- New poll numbers show that the American public’s confidence in US military power has declined, as has specific support for the Afghan war.
- Pakistan has told the US that it may no longer make use of its airspace for drone strikes.
- Lt. Gen. Zaheerul Islam will replace ISI Chief Shuja Pasha as Pakistan’s spymaster on March 18th.
- The ICC has handed down its first ruling: Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga is convicted of conscripting child soldiers.
- A secret squadron of Australian special forces have been at large in Africa performing spy operations in a number of countries.
- Houston plans to honor the returned Iraq war veterans with a parade next month.
- Female soldiers stationed in the US prove their mettle against their male counterparts in cagefighting tournaments.
- Army mental health workers are discouraged from official diagnoses of mental health problems in war zones.
- Back injuries and chronic back pain are troubling veterans.
Photo: Diraz, a village west of Manama, Bahrain. March 10th. Protesters are silhouetted by a flaming barricade they’ve set up as they clash with riot police after Fadhel Mirza’s funeral procession. Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters
I think today will be spent reading Tory’s informative list. Not a very pleasant world we’re living in right now by the looks of it.
Rick Perry defends Marines caught urinating on Taliban corpses in video
Texas Governor Rick Perry, scrambling to keep his U.S. presidential bid alive, accused the Obama administration on Sunday of over-reacting to a videotape that shows four Marines appearing to urinate on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.
“These kids made a mistake. There’s not any doubt about it. They shouldn’t have done it. It’s bad,” Perry told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
“But to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top,” said Perry, who faces a possible make-or-break performance in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary on Saturday. (Photos: Reuters)
Suppose several Vietnamese soldiers did this or, say, Afghan or Iraqi, to “patriotic, young, fearless” American soldiers. What would Perry say? Let me guess: “This is a shameful act of barbaric proportions and those uncouth bastards should be brought before the law for justice. The world is watching and we will teach these men a lesson. God bless America.”
End scene.
Swat’s Malala runner-up for International Children’s Peace Prize
Pakistan: A promising Khyber Pakhtunkhwa student who boldly stood up for girls education in face of threats from the Taliban has been awarded a runner-up prize by the Dutch organisation ‘KidsRights.’
Malala Yousafzai, a 13-year-old student of the Swat Valley, has earned herself ‘International Children’s Peace Prize’ instituted by the Dutch organisation.
(Read: Undaunted courage: 13-year-old Swat girl gets National Peace Prize)
Yousufzai was one of only five children chosen from a pool of 98 originally put forward by organisations and individuals from 42 different countries. She participated in Open Minds project initiated in Swat by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).
(Read: Agents of change: Girls armed with education fight for their rights)
She used the lessons she had learned in the programme to write a series of articles for the BBC News Urdu website during her family’s displacement from the Swat valley in the summer of 2009. KidsRights said that Yousufzai was nominated for this award because her writing was focused on girls’ right to education, which were restricted by the Taliban in the Swat Valley.
Yousufzai dared to stand up for herself and other girls and used national and international media to let the world know that girls should also have the right to go to school.
I’ll admit it: I’m tearing up. Give it up for Malala.
Pakistani girls defy Taliban school bombings
SWABI: Seven-year-old Marwa cried and shook uncontrollably at the sight of the rubble and shattered glass remnants of her classroom. The Taliban had bombed yet another girls’ school in Pakistan.
“I had to pick her up and hold her close to my chest. My worry is that we will spend our time helping the girls deal with fear instead of teaching them math and science,” said head teacher Razia Begum.
“I hope the parents keep sending their children to school.”
Pakistan’s Taliban movement, which is close to al Qaeda, has bombed hundreds of schools since launching a campaign to topple the US-backed government in 2007.
Like Taliban militants in neighboring Afghanistan, the Pakistani Taliban want girls barred from education.
But the Taliban have failed to sell their violent philosophy to the vast majority of Pakistanis, and a campaign to terrify people into supporting militancy has had limited success, as the defiance at Government Girls Primary School No. 3 illustrates.
The students – age 4 to 15 – are undoubtedly scared, and disappointed about the damage to their school in the town of Swabi, 75 km northwest of the capital, Islamabad.
The bombs set off in the red and white brick school complex Sunday were so powerful they stopped wall clocks at the time of impact – nineteen minutes past midnight.
Instead of listening to lectures at their old wooden desks, the girls will be forced to sit on the grass in a courtyard until workers clean the rubble and shattered glass from classrooms pulverized by the bombs.
Still, they are determined to stay in school, hoping to become doctors or lawyers and leave sleepy Swabi for big Pakistani metropolises, or work abroad – dreams that enrage Taliban zealots.
“We are braver than the Taliban,” said Hasina Quraish, 10, who wants to be a college lecturer. “They are brutal people, not good Muslims.”
This gives me a lot of hope.
Pakistani girl, 13, praised for blog under Taliban.
When the Taliban became the de-facto rulers of Pakistan’s Swat region between 2003 and 2009, they ordered schools to close as part of an edict banning girls’ education.
At the time, Malala Yousafzai was just 11, but she spoke out through an anonymous diary on BBC Urdu’s website, and later featured in two New York Times documentaries.
In recognition of her courage, she was recently short-listed for the International Children Peace Prize, awarded by the Dutch organisation KidsRights.
Now aged 13, she spoke to the BBC about her activism.
GET IT, GIRL.
:)
To thwart the Taliban, marines in Helmand province are teaching the locals to read the Koran:
For years, America viewed religion in Afghanistan as a minefield. Worried that the war on terror would be seen as a crusade against Islam, the U.S. military mostly tried not to cause offense, and instead focused on killing insurgents and building up the local government, economy, and security forces. But the Taliban has long wielded religion as a weapon, presenting the Talibs as true believers, and coalition forces and their Afghan allies as infidels and apostates. Though the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency manual makes slight mention of religion, the few references neatly summarize Taliban efforts:
“Islamic extremists use perceived threats to their religion by outsiders to mobilize support for their insurgency and justify terrorist tactics … Effective insurgent propaganda can also turn an artificial problem into a real one.”
In their patch of Helmand, Solomon and his Afghan and American colleagues started meeting this spring to brainstorm ways to counter the Taliban’s message.
“The Taliban are Muslim too, but they do bad things against Islam,” Khabir’s assistant, Sergeant Muhammad Nabi, another mullah, told 20 American and Afghan soldiers and religious advisers crowded into a tent in May. “Islam doesn’t say ‘Kill the people, bury IEDs in the road, and ambush the Afghan army.’ Islam doesn’t say ‘Do suicide attacks against other Muslims.’ We have to talk to those who have dark ideas.”
More here.
Highly recommended read.
“British Force Was Too Weak to Defeat Taliban”
It has been a mixed week for Parliamentary Select Committees: they have regained some of their bite, but recent events have also served to remind us of their supine performances in the past. Yesterday it was the turn of the Defence Committee to seek our attention, briefing their latest report on the British military campaign in Helmand to the Sunday Telegraph. Under the headline ‘British Force Was Too Weak to Defeat Taliban’, we read of ‘a devastating report’ which is ‘deeply critical of senior commanders and government ministers’. But assuming the briefing was accurate, the Committee have got some fairly crucial things wrong. They conclude it is ‘unlikely’ that the decision to deploy troops to Northern Helmand in summer 2006 was put to ministers. In fact, it was. They also conclude that the task force was ‘capped at 3,150 for financial reasons’. In fact, it wasn’t. More important than finances was the ongoing commitment in Iraq, together with the Army’s own ‘cap’ on the number of soldiers it could deploy on a sustainable basis across both operations.
The Committee does expose some useful truths, for example that “Defence Chiefs told ministers they had enough helicopters in Helmand, even though field commanders complained of shortages.” Whether on helicopters, protected vehicles, or pre-deployment troop numbers, the dynamic inside the Ministry of Defence was not the crude version peddled by the Sun newspaper – of ‘Generals begging for more and being ignored’ – but the more insidious problem of self-censorship by a military hierarchy who saw Afghanistan as a chance to restore their reputation after Iraq and were determined not to frighten off ministers with a full account of the problems, uncertainties, and risks.
[…]
So yes, there were shocking failures in decision-making during in this period, but the Committee failed to bring any real insight to identifying and analysing them. It’s all been done better elsewhere: the pre-deployment planning was deconstructed by the Times, the decision-making during summer 2006 by Professor Anthony King – both over a year ago. Most importantly, the Committee get the balance wrong. Put simply, there were four things the British military didn’t have enough of in Helmand: troops, equipment (like helicopters and protected vehicles), intelligence, and strategy. I have argued before that the public debate has been distorted by excessive focus on the first two, at the expense of the latter two, and this latest report will reinforce that.
[continued]
Read more here.
Rehab for the radicalised:
MINGORA: At the rehabilitation center for former militants in Pakistan’s Swat valley, the psychiatrist speaks for the young man sitting opposite him in silence. “It was terrible. He was unable to escape. The fear is so strong. Still the fear is so strong.”
Hundreds of miles away in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, a retired army officer recalls another young man who attacked him while he prayed – his “absolutely expressionless face” as he crouched down robot-like to reload his gun.
Both youths had been sucked into an increasingly fierce campaign of gun and bomb attacks by Islamist militants on military and civilian targets across Pakistan.
But there the similarity stops.
One is now being “de-radicalised” in the rehabilitation center in Swat, the northern region which only two years ago was overrun by the Pakistani Taliban and has since been cleared after a massive military operation.
He will be taught that Islam does not permit violence against the state and that suicide bombing is “haram” or forbidden.
With the highly controversial role that the Pakistani army plays and the dwindling trust the nations shows in it, it is hard to express delight at such ‘rehabilitating’ efforts. Read more here and share your thoughts.
Via Dawn.
This attack shows that the Taliban have sympathizers and insiders in the security establishment. It also shows that they have become more powerful and sophisticated in their planning and attacks.
Islamabad-based security analyst Talat Masood • Putting into perspective the Taliban’s attack on a Pakistani naval base — a siege that lasted nearly 16 hours before Pakistani commandos were able to fend the insurgents off. The attack, reportedly in retaliation for the killing of Osama bin Laden. In fact, they laid it out as such: “Fifteen of our fighters entered the naval air base and we don’t expect them to return,” said Pakistani Taliban spokesperson Ehsanullah Ehsan. “They are there to kill. Our issue with Pakistan is its secular policies and friendship with America.” source (via shortformblog)
Concurred. It’s becoming common knowledge that several funded factions and organizational bodies within Pakistan discreetly support and assist insurgency.
(via shortformblog)
Declassified U.S.-Pakistan documents out, describes US Ambassador Chamberlain’s discussions with ISI Chief Mahmud right after 9/11. So much for CIA’s astonishment at ISI’s collusion with the Taliban!
Quoting Mahmud:
We will not flinch from a military effort but a strike will produce thousands of frustrated young Muslim men. It will be an incubator of anger that will explode two or three years from now.
And kill 12,580 civilians in 2010 alone. CIA acknowledged the repercussions and still went forward with the attacks.
World Press Photo of the Year 2010
Photo by: Jodi Bieber
—
Bibi Aisha, an 18-year-old woman from Oruzgan province in Afghanistan, fled back to her family home from her husband’s house, complaining of violent treatment. The Taliban arrived one night, demanding Bibi be handed over to face justice. After a Taliban commander pronounced his verdict, Bibi’s brother-in-law held her down and her husband sliced off her ears and then cut off her nose. Bibi was abandoned, but later rescued by aid workers and the U.S. military. After time in a women’s refuge in Kabul, she was taken to America, where she received counseling and reconstructive surgery. Bibi Aisha now lives in the United States. World Press Photo of the Year 2010, Jodi Bieber, South Africa, Institute for Artist Management/Goodman Gallery for Time magazine.
Can’t get her out of my mind.
